


monster shaped and buried deep

by wearenotsaints



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a bittersweet end, Gen, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, Steve as Dustin's surrogate bro is all I ever wanted and needed, Steve is the babysitter we all need, Steve is trying, Why do I keep making Steve sad???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 19:13:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12732570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearenotsaints/pseuds/wearenotsaints
Summary: It’s an ordinary way to feel an ordinary pain/with an extraordinary sense of shame/It’s hit and run(or: sometimes Steve wishes someone would tell him just when the fuck he'll feel normal again)





	monster shaped and buried deep

**Author's Note:**

> *sigh* one day, I'll write the happy, fluffy Steve & the kids fic I keep sitting down to write. This is not that day.
> 
> Italics in summary from Diamond Sky by Oliver Daldry

“It’s fine! I’m _fine_!” Dustin shouts, voice pitched high, fingers interlaced atop his hat and he still won’t meet Steve’s eyes. 

“Bullshit,” Steve hisses and even that stings. Stings like he’s still back there in that damn bathroom, red punch staining the white of his collar and shirt sleeves. Nancy slurring at him with venom in her eyes and barbs on her tongue.

_Barb, hah._

Everything always comes back to Barb. And Will. And monsters walking out of the shadows to pull people into a place not so far away. Always people Steve convinced himself he didn’t care about because caring was _so fucking uncool_. And anyway, look where it got him. 

Steve palms the back of Dustin’s head and pulls him into his chest across the center console because Steve is scared that if he doesn’t, Dustin might disappear too.

Dustin, for all his blustering, doesn’t resist. Just pushes his face into the soft leather encasing Steve’s shoulder and sags. All that built up thirteen year old— _fourteen in a week thank you very much_ —anger and sadness and frustration seeping out with a heavy sigh. Because sometimes all anyone ever needs in someone else who gets it. 

And once upon a time Steve thought that was his parents, but then they went and made it clear they couldn’t (or maybe it was wouldn’t) be that. So he figured it’d be better to leave before anyone could let him down again, and it was working, working so well, but Nancy had other plans.

Or maybe that was just Steve projecting. 

Either way, she made him _want to try_.

 **Bullshit**.

 **Everything is bullshit**.

Steve realizes his shoulder is getting damp the same moment Dustin asks for a tissue. Steve tugs out a stack of ratty McDonald’s napkins from the driver’s side door and watches Dustin wipe away the snot and tears. He is still leaning into Steve’s side. Because this is what they do now. The sadness, or fear, _or whatever_ comes in waves. Steve doesn’t really know all the things that can set their mismatched crew off, but he’s started a list. Keeps it folded up in a corner of his wallet. He’s hoping there will come a day when he doesn’t need to keep adding to it like a grocery list. 

“I hate this,” Dustin mumbles, knuckles pressed into his eyes. He lets out a shuddery breath and Steve is reminded again of how young these kids are. How much he wishes things were different. Except for the small selfish part that doesn’t. 

Steve didn’t know how to show up for anything real, in any significant way, until a pale monster with a flower’s head of teeth came out of the Byer’s wall and Steve learned to wield a baseball bat full of nails. Until the fragile lie of happiness Steve kept stringing Nancy along with fractured and he discovered that maybe he was better at saving a group of shitty— _wonderfulstrongdeterminedfierce_ —kids than anything else. 

It was a direction. A purpose that for once didn’t feel like someone else’s being shoved down his throat.

“Me too. Shit. Me too,” Steve grits out, and Dustin _laughs_. Honest to god laughs in a startled, yelping kind of way. Like when he showed Steve to the storm cellar where he’d trapped Dart. And the surprise of it, the inappropriateness of how easy they fluctuate between everything these days, makes Steve laugh too. Has him doubled over, clutching the steering wheel with both hands so hard his knuckles turn white.

“What?” Dustin whines, but he’s still laughing and Steve knows this; this isn’t bullshit.

No, not at all.

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me:  
> juliangohome.tumblr.com


End file.
